The Jack Dee Interview

And you ran a restaurant, right?
I tried but I was mostly too drunk. The danger was that I would get home at night and not remember if I’d cashed up. So instead of deciding that I won’t get drunk again, I thought that when I cash up and lock it in the safe, I’ll whack my head, hard, against the safe. That way, when I get home, if I can’t remember cashing up I’ll just check if there’s a f*cking great bruise on my face. That was my logic at the time.

You had serious problems with alcohol. Do you discuss that in the book?
I deal with why I thought I was an alcoholic.

Why did you?
Well, in a way it was useful to have the book to do that as it gave me the chance to explain the story fully and in context. Otherwise what happens is the media enjoy being able to boil it down to a nutshell because that’s what they, well, you, have to do and it becomes a distortion of the truth. Then the next person who interviews you reads that headline and before you know it it’s become worse and it’s, you know, “Jack Dee: my booze hell.”

Honestly, is it a facade that you’re always annoyed about something?
Sadly, no. You cannot manufacture that. Often people will pick something and say, for example, “Surely this Twitter thing annoys you?” And I’ll say, “No. That doesn’t annoy me.” I don’t have to force myself to hate things. It comes easily.

What p*sses you off in this room?
I’m not going to play that game because I could find something, easily, but then it would p*ss me off.

What’s your top-three biggest grievances at the moment?
But that’ll p*ss me off.

Please?
[He huffs] Electric hand-dryers in public lavatories. Recycling air in a public lavatory is not a nice idea, plus they simply don’t work. They don’t work! [Gets going] Next, technology needs to slow down. In fact, no more inventions for a bit, by anyone. I need to catch up and I still don’t know how to get Sky in my house and stuff. Stop bombarding me with these new f*cking ideas – you’re really f*cking with my head now. You can watch TV shows before they’ve even been made these days. It’s too clever.